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Nairobi Journal Textualization of History in Poems Nairobi Nairobi Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Journal Textualization of History in Poems from East Africa by Cook and Rubadiri Nairobi Journal of Humanities Bwocha Nyagemi and Social Sciences Department of Languages and Linguistics, Archbishop Mihanyo University College of Tabora Volume 1, Issue 1, 2017 © 2017 The Author(s). This open ABSTRACT access article is distributed under Using new historicism, this paper examines textualization a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license. of history in selected poems from Cook and Rubadiri anthology, Poems from East Africa (1971). A textual Article Information Submitted: 30th December 2016 analysis of poems with titles that encompass appellations Accepted: 5th February 2017 of real humans, such as Martin Luther King and Yatuta Published: 15th March 2017 Chisiza, and places, such as Vietnam and Angola, have Conflict of Interest: No conflict of interest was reported by the been selected in order to compare how history and authors historicization has been undertaken in poetry. History Funding: None and historicization are examined as twin elements that Additional information is available ambivalently help readers in understanding the context at the end of the article and inspiration of the poets in the selected poems for this study. The reading established that there is a one to one correlation between the messages contained in the texts (poems) and the historicities surrounding such creations. https://creativecommons.org/lice nses/by/4.0/ It also established that the personalities in the poems: Martin Luther King, Yatuta Chisiza, Major Christopher ISSN 2523-0948 (Online) Okigbo, inter alia, fought for causes that, to this day, afflict humanity as a whole. The reading also found that ISSN 2520-4009 (Print) wars such as was the war in Vietnam, Angola, Maji Maji Revolt, and many more, mirror the current wars in various parts of the world. Keywords: historization, maji maji revolt, new historicism, poetry . Page 87 Volume 1, Issue 1 Nairobi Nairobi Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Journal 1.0 Introduction The relationship between Literature and reality has attracted profound and enduring interest from both literary theorists and literary critics. Being a product of the writer’s vivid artistic imagination, literature captures, with point blank accuracy, the observations made by the creative writer, observations that blend the realities of everyday life with imagination. This blending of human experience with imagination is what gives rise to art, to poetry, to literature. The creative writer is both a recorder and a maker of history, but unlike historians (in the ordinary sense) who capture in their writings what has actually taken place, a creative writer relies more on their imagination to record what they think makes sense in the present time, besides what they conjecture could take place and make sense ad infinitum. To a creative writer therefore human experience is constructed to suit the needs of one’s imagination. These happenings might be related to the society the creative writer hails from or just be a microcosm of what could happen anywhere in the cosmos. The creative writer thus transcends both temporal and spatial boundaries. It is thus this amalgam of human experience and art that a creative writer presents to the reader who then is supposed to appreciate the aesthetic impact the work might have upon them. The writer’s immediate experiences are communicated in ways unique to the writer. The creative writer’s style is as idiolectal as their thinking is idiosyncratic, the reason writers can present the same reality in diverse ways thus making literary/poetic reality as multifaceted as there are writers themselves. Thus reality in literature is always subjective. The writer’s work is to make an attempt at persuading the reader to view reality from a given standpoint, besides making the reader appreciate the fact that they do not even have to agree with the writer’s way of looking at reality. This perhaps is the condition of life itself: it is not possible that one will always persuade another to embrace a certain perspective on life. This is informed by the fact that writers emerge from real social-historical and cultural backgrounds which in most instances are mirrored in their writings. Their knowledge of what happens in reality perhaps functions as a source of inspiration for their artistic expressions. Be that as it may, writers will always find readers/critics who will embrace their (the writers’) perspectives and those who will not. Those who do disagree with writers’ standpoints help generate further knowledge by introducing new trajectories to given phenomena thus making the field of creative writing rich in the generation of novel ideas. This paper discusses the various poems in David Cook and David Rubadiri’s edition of poetry anthology Poems from East Africa (1971). The poetry in the anthology was written in the late 1960s, 1970 and 1971. The study takes cognizance of the correlation between real life situation (what has been referred to as the world of reality in the preceding paragraphs) and poetry, the ‘factual’ and ‘fictitious’, in a bid Page 88 Volume 1, Issue 1 Nairobi Nairobi Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Journal to unravel the import presented in the poetry in this anthology. This study has employed the neo-historical approach (New Historicism which is, by extension, known as ‘Cultural poetics’) whereby history is viewed as including all of the cultural, social, political, anthropological discourses at work in any given age, and these various ‘texts’ are inescapably part of a social construct. 2.0 New historicism This approach was propounded by Stephen Greenblatt and Michel Foucault through his intertextual methods focusing especially on issues of power and knowledge. New Historicism frequently addresses the critical theory based idea that the lowest common denominator for all human actions is power, so the New Historicist seeks to find examples of power and how it is dispersed within the text. Power is a means through which the marginalized are controlled, and the things that the marginalized (or other) seek to gain. This relates back to the idea that because literature is written by those who have the most power (read knowledge), there must be details in it that show the views of the common people. New Historicists seek to find "sites of struggle" to identify just who is the group or entity with the most power. The presentation and interpretation of events, which the writer appears to support or condemn, is in a way reflexive of the writer’s culture as far a new historicists are concerned. At other times it can be seen to do both. According to Barry (2002), New Historicism is a critical theory propounded by American critic Stephen Greenblatt whose book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from more to Shakespeare (1980) is usually regarded as its beginning. Barry further observes that tendencies similar to New Historicism can be identified in works by various critics published during the 1970s, a good example being J. W. Lever's The Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama (published by Methuen in 1971, and reissued in 1987 with an introduction by Jonathan Dollimore). He explains that this brief and epoch-making book challenged conservative critical views about Jacobean theatre, and linked the plays much more closely with the political events of their era than previous critics had done. Barry writes that a simple definition of the new historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non- literary texts, usually of the same historical period. Almost all the poems analysed in this paper were written during the historical period the mentioned figures lived and/or were assassinated. Barry continues that new historicism refuses (at least ostensibly) to 'privilege' the literary text: instead of a literary 'foreground' and a historical 'background' it envisages and practises a mode of study in which literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other. This paper has adopted this approach to criticism. He further writes that this 'equal weighting' is suggested in the definition of new historicism offered by the American critic Louis Montrose who defines it as a combined interest in 'the Page 89 Volume 1, Issue 1 Nairobi Nairobi Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Journal textuality of history, the historicity of texts'. (Barry, 2002 pp.119-120). Montrose’s definition of New Historicism is what has been adopted through modification for the title of this chapter: Textualization of History in Poems from East Africa by Cook and Rubadiri. This interplay of literary and non-literary texts in New Historicism enables the critic to read meanings into works of art in comparison with the historical happenings of the period the literary works were constructed. Foucault's conception of power is neither reductive nor synonymous with domination. Rather he understands power (in modern times at least) as continually articulated on knowledge and knowledge on power. This theory also encompasses elements of Marxist Literary perspective. According to Derek (2001), Brizee and Tompkins have this to say about New Historicism: This school, influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time (Michel Foucault's concept of épistème). New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the historic moment that created it. Specifically, New Criticism is "...a practice that has developed out of contemporary theory, particularly the structuralist realization that all human systems are symbolic and subject to the rules of language, and the deconstructive realization that there is no way of positioning oneself as an observer outside the closed circle of textuality" (Richter 1205).
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